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Lessons Unlearned While Working At A Startup

The following guest post is by Jiyan Wei, cofounder of BuildZoom, a platform that connects homeowners with remodeling contractors, a Y-Combinator-backed startup.

When you’re working at a large company, the rules are simpler: build good relationships with management, get your work done on time, hit your deadlines.

Prior to BuildZoom, I spent four years working as a product manager for a publicly traded tech company. My life was about building consensus, facilitating communication and driving revenue. I knew the right things to say in roadmap discussions, how to get what I needed from different departments and how to stick to the plan. Life was simple and good.

Moving to a startup was a jolt. Fortunately, while I had been learning how to drive incremental changes in a large organization, my co-founder Dave had spent his time building and running startups. I learned a lot from him and even more when we participated in Y Combinator.

Here are some of the main lessons I unlearned at a startup:

1. Don’t do things that scale

In BuildZoom’s early days, I spent a lot of time designing systems that I thought would help us over the next five years. For example, we wanted to make sure our early supply-side users were exclusively licensed contractors so I designed and implemented a sophisticated verification system that required new users to have a phone number we could verify through public records (to Dave’s dismay).

After a month, we realized that even though we were possibly filtering out one or two spammers we were also filtering out over 50% of the legitimate users. We quickly dismantled the system that I had spent countless hours on.

Y Combinator and more specifically, Paul Graham, originally articulated the notion that it is important for entrepreneurs to do things that don’t scale when starting a business. The verification system is just one example of how my early attempts to think long-term, had a negative impact on our startup (on a side note, I really wish we had those users back).

2. Accomplish your objective by any means necessary without hurting people

If you are one of the two or three people who have read the Craigslist terms, you would have encountered the following:

Off the top of my head, I can cite at least three wildly successful startups whose early-stage growth plan was based on violating these terms (we’re not one of them). When nobody knows who you are and you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on marketing, you have to figure out how to get people to pay attention and that typically means going where they are (e.g. Google, Facebook, Craigslist). Unless you have built an early stage product with true virality, at some point you’ll have to figure out how to systematically acquire users from these other places and this requires you to dabble in a gray area.

I’m not suggesting that entrepreneurs should go “Ocean’s Eleven” on the market but consider that the existing framework has been shaped according to the standards set by large businesses and institutions. What you are doing is fundamentally subversive. If you spend time obsessing over all the bad things that could happen, you’re going to end up building something worse than someone else who is obsessing over all the good things that could happen.

3. Do what is going to create the most value

After the first few months, I found it increasingly difficult to organize my time. My to-do list had steadily grown beyond my ability to execute on it.

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